Been super busy working on the new Aureal website, along with the new DOS and Windows drivers, their new control panels and fixing up all the official documentations errors, and getting everything ready before the VR headsets launch in April.

bjt wrote:

Finished organising my games collection. Cracked jewel cases replaced, split boxes repaired with book repair tape, floppies imaged and burned to a CD-R per box.

This is quite a collection... I recognize a few old favs. I still have a few big boxes... but nowhere near to what I did have. Pretty sure I still have Blade-runner still in store... I doubt I would have ever parted with that.

Keep on rockin'

Not really retro but I did restore a badly damaged Asus K70AB notebook back to life.
The notebook clearly had a hellish life so far, a lot of dirt in it, the dc connector in the base was broken loose but after disassembling it turned out to be some very very small liquid damaged that killed the board. (it actually hums softly now while it's plugged in without anything on it 😵 )
Had to take everything except the lid apart and clean/repair and reassemble it. 😠
Cleaning alone took an hour with all dust/food remains and cathair in it... how some people handle their electronics really ain't doing it well. Luckily I got my hands on a stack of motherboards and other parts for this range of notebooks so it runs great again now after assembling.

ZanQuance wrote:

Been super busy working

I have a hunch you may be buying a subsidiary from the company or just all of it....

either those or you are hacking their sites one page at a time! 🤣

Edit; - I just came across your thread and the answers are revealed.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I found that this device is really only good for TV resolutions such as 720p and 1080p. It does 1080p60 though. On newer gear (Windows XP and higher) you can let the GPU do the scaling which works great.

I think the Game Capture HD60 can do 480p as well, but it will not take a 640x480 DVI signal at all.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

For older 4:3 resolutions AVerMedia capture cards are much better. Apart from the very latest Extreme unit. That one also only takes TV resolutions, which is a real shame.

I've never used AVerMedia capture devices, so I have no idea what their quality is like, but in my experience with HDMI-capable capture devices, audio is really where things become messy, and I am INSANELY picky about that. I first had a Roxio GameCap HD Pro, which was an absolute pile of junk, I hated this thing from its glitch-infested software to its absolutely horrendous audio quality over both HDMI and Component (massive loss of bass and severe distortion). Afterwards, I got three more capture devices, two from Hauppauge and the aforementioned Elgato Game Capture HD60. The Hauppauge capture devices are the HD PVR 2 and HD PVR Rocket, both of which accept DVI inputs, although the HD PVR 2 only supports 640x480, and very badly at that. The resulting capture from the HD PVR 2 has all sorts of chroma shift with colors appearing in the wrong places and fringing like what you would get in Composite. The HD PVR Rocket supports many more DVI resolutions, but trying to record audio with this thing is HIGHLY problematic. While it has an analog input, it doesn't seem to work properly when used in standalone capture mode (this capture device can be used without a computer if you plug in a USB stick to the device and plug its double-ended USB cable's red plug into either a USB port on the computer you're recording from or a power supply with a USB connector for charging tablets, phones and the like) and the newest beta firmware breaks analog audio when using the HDMI input with Hauppauge's TERRIBLE native capture software (I despise this thing as much as Roxio's software because it will crash almost non-stop) despite correcting a bug causing glitchy video playback in VLC from standalone capture. My biggest complaint with the HD PVR Rocket, though, is its God-awful audio compression. It's not too apparent in a modern game, but on older games, you hear it A LOT. It does a very good job at recording 640x480 DVI, but its audio recording just plain sucks, and I haven't found a workaround yet.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I have a scaler also, the one from StarTech, might be similar to the one you have. I noticed that it doesn't do 60 fps, but I think that is at higher resolutions only. The main advantage is that it's a scaler, so it's great when you record a session installing Windows, entering the BIOS, installing drivers, trying a game and want to capture everything in one hit.

The Lenkeng LKV351 Pro is a scaler, but it's not the same thing as your StarTech scaler. The LKV351 Pro also can convert Component to HDMI, accepting inputs from 480i to 1080p, but it can also take VGA all the way down to DOS' 320x200 (doesn't scale well horizontally, unfortunately) up to 1920x1080, in which case, it looks like a native HDMI signal. What I noticed with this converter is it seems to do a better job converting higher resolutions than it does lower. Low resolutions tend to have blurry output, especially in Component, where the resulting HDMI output can potentially look WORSE than the source. In VGA, it looks like bilinear filtering is applied, and I really don't like this. The LKV351 Pro outputs only at 720p and 1080p 50/60Hz, but it's able to accept all its supported resolutions at 60FPS and output at 60FPS as well. It does, however, have a colorspace issue much like the StarTech converter. The LKV351 Pro, according to the XRGB-Mini's status menu (this converter gives you nearly every single detail about the incoming video signal it's receiving), uses the YPbPr Limited colorspace (that's fine for Component, but for the VGA input, the output should be in RGB, not YPbPr). If I set the Game Capture HD60 to record at full range colorspace, whites get too dark and blacks get too bright, which is a clear sign it's outputting in limited colorspace.

Yea the StarTech has the colour space issue as well. For audio I capture with a Sound Blaster Titanium HD, regardless of what capture device I use.

Installed the AHA-1520. The ST1420N would spin up, get recognized by the AHA-1520 but not connected. The ST1480N was jumper powered: it turns out it had to be software powered up by the AHA-1520. It will not boot in the AST Advantage. The AHA-1520 is truly 16BIT: it hangs the IBM Personal System/2 30 8530 8086.

I am waiting for a smaller / ancient ST-296N to try the ST-01 one more time. 😀

Im testing a IDT WinChip for the first time.

I have just started benching SuperPi 1M and the WinChip is not exactly fast! 😁

I just broke off a pin on a BIOS chip I was removing from a socket 7 board because Im going to wash the board.

The pin I broke off is an adress selecting pin, A15. Im I correct when Im thinking that this adress selecting pin isnt used on a normal 32 pin flash chip in a Socket 7 system? I read some BIOS programmmer documentation that indicated that only adress pins up to adress pin 12 was used or perhaps 11 as it is adress pin number 12 (0-11)

Try it and see if it works. It won't hurt anything to not have that pin.

luckybob wrote:

Try it and see if it works. It won't hurt anything to not have that pin.

The problem is that the adress selecting pins are used when erasing the BIOS (I think), so if I try to upgrade the BIOS I might end up with a chip that is 90% erased but cant erase the rest. The documentation I skimmed through indicated that A15 only was used when more than one BIOS share the chip.

Its not a huge issue though, in worst case I would have to "hot-flash" a new chip. The board is soaking at the moment, it looked like it spent a winter outside...

Edit.

After reading some more I think it is used, it wasnt A0 - A12 it was AMS to A12. AMS is "the most significant adress pin", in this case A16 so its A16 to A12 that is used and A11 to A0 is unused. At least on the flash chip SST39SF010A when erasing if I understand things right.

/Edit

I suppose the pin is broken of in such a way that You cannot solder a bit of wire?
I repaired an Atari TIA chip that I carelessly ripped a pin off by using a dremel to expose
the metal part, then soldered a wire and all good after that.
Worst case scenario, get another chip from ebay or Aliexpress but make sure it's a flash
rom, not a standard eprom.

Imperious wrote:

I suppose the pin is broken of in such a way that You cannot solder a bit of wire? I repaired an Atari TIA chip that I carelessl […]
Show full quote

I suppose the pin is broken of in such a way that You cannot solder a bit of wire?
I repaired an Atari TIA chip that I carelessly ripped a pin off by using a dremel to expose
the metal part, then soldered a wire and all good after that.
Worst case scenario, get another chip from ebay or Aliexpress but make sure it's a flash
rom, not a standard eprom.

I could probably do that, or hotflash a new chip. I was just hoping the pin was unused to I wouldnt have to but now Im pretty sure it's needed, at least when erasing the chip.

Or just program a spare chip and slap it in. That's what I would most likely do

Not a PC... but today I thought my Gameboy might have suffered a bad scratch on the screen. I took a closer look and...

http://i.imgur.com/YIznXA3.gifv

Yup. 20+ year old film. So satisfying. 😊

*rubs nipples*

Hahaha I just got the second most hopeless board of the sorry lot of 6 I bought going. 😀

It's the Gigabyte Ga-586ATV 430VX board that had the leads pulled half way out on more than half the major caps (how can this even happen?). I pushed the leads back in again and the board seems to be working... so far no exploding caps...

Leads pulled out on caps really makes no sense at all. Photo please.

Cap leads are soldered to the pcb, You can't pull them out as such, but You could possibly rip the caps out from the top. Either way they are buggered, so replace them.
Unless of course this isn't actually about capacitors?

Imperious wrote:

Leads pulled out on caps really makes no sense at all. Photo please.

Cap leads are soldered to the pcb, You can't pull them out as such, but You could possibly rip the caps out from the top. Either way they are buggered, so replace them.
Unless of course this isn't actually about capacitors?

I cant take a photo as I pushed the leads in again. It looked like someone had tried to rip the caps of the board like you would pull out a tooth or a nail, only they were not pulled all the way out and the leads not snipped off.

You can sort of see it in this picture (the sellers), but you can only hint it. Before I bought the board I only spotted the one in the bottom left corner but I only thought it wasnt soldered flat to the board. In fact only 3-4 of the caps around the CPU socket did not have the leads pulled out at all even if some only had them pulled out 1-2mm. I played whack a mole with them!

The board seems fully functional without any instability at all so Im not going to recap it, not now at least. On this forum it's often a good idea to assume people know what they are talking about 😉.

Thanks for that. I assumed it had to be that someone tried to rip the caps off the board.